Saturday, October 13, 2012

Morning Meditation by Charles Spurgeon

"Godly sorrow worketh repentance."—2 Corinthians 7:10.

Genuine, spiritual mourning for sin is the work of the Spirit of God.
Repentance is too choice a flower to grow in nature's garden. Pearls
grow naturally in oysters, but penitence never shows itself in sinners
except divine grace works it in them. If thou hast one particle of real
hatred for sin, God must have given it thee, for human nature's thorns
never produced a single fig. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh."True repentance has a distinct reference to the Saviour.
When we repent of sin, we must have one eye upon sin and another upon
the cross, or it will be better still if we fix both our eyes upon
Christ and see our transgressions only, in the light of His love.True sorrow for sin is eminently practical.
No man may say he hates sin, if he lives in it. Repentance makes us see
the evil of sin, not merely as a theory, but experimentally—as a burnt
child dreads fire. We shall be as much afraid of it, as a man who has
lately been stopped and robbed is afraid of the thief upon the highway;
and we shall shun it—shun it in everything—not in great things only, but
in little things, as men shun little vipers as well as great snakes.
True mourning for sin will make us very jealous over our tongue, lest it
should say a wrong word; we shall be very watchful over our daily
actions, lest in anything we offend, and each night we shall close the
day with painful confessions of shortcoming, and each morning awaken
with anxious prayers, that this day God would hold us up that we may not
sin against Him.Sincere repentance is continual.
Believers repent until their dying day. This dropping well is not
intermittent. Every other sorrow yields to time, but this dear sorrow
grows with our growth, and it is so sweet a bitter, that we thank God we
are permitted to enjoy and to suffer it until we enter our eternal
rest.